title: the price of survival when: post the tinkerer where: around trigger warnings: sad shit, mentions of torture and so on
Steady as the earth, unchanging as the mountains.
That is the image she has built for herself over the past two years. The pillar holding the halfblooded up, the comforting earth bringing harvest for the hungry and cover to the weary. A rock, unwavering as she held up the sky so that all of her people would sleep easier without knowing how much it weighed.
But time destroys everything.
It whisks away the mountains, creating scars even in the hardest of stones.
Fifteen years is a long time to stand strong, when there is no hope left and she can feel everyone she ever loved dying one by one. Trapped in their own mind, the halfblooded had not been able to do nothing but watch as the Great Old Ones took and took and took. Faith, hope, resilience, eroded away as her magic was forced out of her time and time and time and time again. And yet, even as she was forced down to nothing, even as she stood in a room surrounded by her people but unable to look at them, she clung to the barest hints of hope flickering on her chest.
It could not end like this.
All their hopes, their sacrifices, their efforts, it could not end like this.
This is not the soft epilogue that they deserved, not the dream she had dreamed on better days.
It is not her ending.
Never.
Not like this.
It is rage, what survived the longest, at the end. Rage that stopped her from breaking. Outrage, bitter resentment at the state of the world, of her people. Killed, experimented on, seen as useful tools and plaything, the life of a halfblooded had never been easy, but they managed. They built their niches and survived like the cockroaches that many thought they were. They survived, then they lived. Found their happiness in what way they could.
Her induction into the Senate had opened a door for something better, something bigger, and she would not let their story end like the tragedy it had been building to be.
And yet, for years she could do nothing but move when the being inhabiting Ren told her to. Nothing but do anything he wanted the second he wanted it.
It was fifteen long years were the only reason she didn’t break was her anger. Someone had to be strong, someone had to endure, for her people, for their destroyed legacy. She had to survive this and rip the Great Old Ones’ empire apart on the seams, or it would have all been for nothing.
She could not let Kay’s death be for nothing.
It’s the anger she holds is what keeps her alive, but it is her love for her people that makes her move the second the Great Old Ones’ control falls away. Finally, after more than a decade, her will is her own, and Cloe moves. Rage fuels her magic as she reaches for the other survivors and they escape.
Leaving Micah’s corpse behind is almost enough to break her, but finding Komos’ body amidst the ruins is what pushes her over the edge.
Cloe loses sense of time after that, only quick flashes of violence, blood and death pushing through the fog of overwhelming grief. Destruction follows her through Forsaken Rome until she suddenly finds herself fighting along the survivors, with no idea of what they are fighting for. She doesn't care, all she wants is for the monsters before her to burn. (Later, she remembers that the demigods are victims too, later, she realizes that she should have had empathy for the souls trapped inside their very bodies just as she had been, but for now, all she knows is hate.)
Cloe dies angry, her hope and kindness shattered underneath cruelty and greed.
She wakes up to the battlefield that forewarned the destruction of her world, allies long dead surrounding her, Esme’s face mirroring her shock.
She wakes up angry.
Brittle and jaded, she wants to throw herself into the fight with more rage and desperation than anyone who did not survive would find out of character, but all she has enough time to grit her teeth and extend her hand.
Then it all ends.
They win.
She becomes something else altogether.
Standing on the battlefield, surrounded by ghosts, it takes her all the shreds of sanity she has left not to break. To stop the shifting tectonic plates on her chest slam together and shake the very earth where they stand.
She is a failure of a leader, a Senator that drove her people to oblivion, she is a disgrace.
She is the only leader her people, the halfblooded and the strange new species she has become, have.
Cloe holds herself together by her nails alone, even as they begin to rip apart and their beds begin to bleed. It is her duty, and she will always do her duty. Out of love, out of loyalty, out of hope.
Senator Corvina floats through the aftermath of the war, her presence visible and felt as she helps with rebuilding, as she smiles and welcomes back all those who had left Rome for safety. She rebuilds her mask and hides her shattering psyche behind it, attempting to avoid anything that would break the delicate construction before she can afford to.
Once more, she is chosen as her people’s leader, despite the rising pile of failures she leaves in her wake.
She wants to scream, but she cannot afford to.
If a tree falls in a forest, and there is no one around to hear, does it make a sound? If an eladrin's mind fractures but no one sees the cracks on her composure, is she still hurting?
She doesn’t know.
All she knows is that the world has changed, and with it the senate. It’s beyond her wildest hopes, her greatest desires. It’s everything she has dreamed of since she reached Rome, everything she wanted.
She sees the world she dreamed of, and feels nothing.
That is when she realizes she needs to leave to survive.
She needs to disappear, if only for a little while.
Only a few people are told of her impromptu sabbatical, only a few people know how to reach her as she runs away from herself, for herself.
The Senators, so that they know she will come back.
Micah and Nabi, so they know she won’t abandon them.
Nathan, so he can watch for the halfblooded — her people despite all changes, her greatest love, the community, the home, she had built but she no longer belongs to —.
No one else.
Cloe Brenna Corvida disappears into the night, one cold evening in early November.
She is not seen for weeks.
She finds herself in Lake Bled, watching the waves lap the shore on the place where her parents meet. The eladrin stands there for hours, locked in position as she finally allows herself to shatter. Crack by crack, injury by injury, she breaks under the pressure she had kept at bay because of her duty.
Cloe breaks at the shores where her mother found her greatest love, and the world breaks with her. Kept at bay for weeks, Cloe had kept her newly bestowed control over the earth on a tight grip, knowing that the moment she loosened it, she would be unable to control it. Slowly, and then all at once, she lets her control go and the very earth shakes with her grief as she finally allows herself to scream.
She forgets how long she lays there, broken, bent and bowing to cruelty, but slowly what had fallen apart is brought together once more. Slowly, she regains herself, bit by bit.
She rebuilds herself from the ashes from her death, and opens her eyes to a changed world.
She opens her eyes and weeps, finally feeling the joy of knowing that if she were to leave it, the world would be a better place than she had found it.
As November comes to a close, she returns to Rome. She is calmer, steadier, hopeful, and yet still full of anger.
She doesn’t know how not to be angry anymore.
For fifteen years, it was all she was, and she does not know what will happen if she lets that anger go.
She hopes it will be freeing, to let go of the desperate emotion that kept her alive, but she does not know.
She really wants to find out, though. So when she returns, she turns her gaze towards the offer of help extended by the Eye, and against all her wildest imaginations, it works.
Cloe learns the first steps to healing, and suddenly the road ahead is wide open.
Suddenly, she can fly where she had been drowning.
